Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo Asks FDA for Data on Risks of DNA Contaminants in COVID-19 Vaccines

This article originally appeared in Alachua Chronicle and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Jennifer Cabrera

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – On December 6, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo sent a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), asking questions about a recent preprint documenting the detection of billions of DNA fragments per dose in the approved Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines; Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter/enhancer DNA was also found in Pfizer vials.

In the letter, Dr. Ladapo points out that the vaccines use lipid nanoparticles to efficiently deliver mRNA into human cells, so the vaccines may be equally efficient at delivering the DNA contaminants into human cells.

Read the letter here.

On today's episode of: What the FDA… I asked @DrCaliff_FDA to address the DNA fragments detected in mRNA COVID shots & how they are hitchhiking into human cells. DNA integration into the human genome & oncogenesis are known risks, even acknowledged by @US_FDA in '07. pic.twitter.com/V7TBaeM1WN

— Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD (@FLSurgeonGen) December 6, 2023

In an exclusive interview, Dr. Ladapo explained to Alachua Chronicle that it’s not unusual for medications to have DNA contamination, so the FDA provided formal guidance in 2007 on mitigating the risks associated with those contaminants. Those risks could include the integration of these DNA fragments with human DNA, changes to our genes that could be passed down to offspring, and the development of cancer because the genes within a cell control whether the cell is healthy or cancerous. 

Dr. Ladapo said the risks of DNA contamination in previous medications were relatively low, but the addition of the lipid nanoparticle delivery system is completely new, and now the DNA fragments are “getting this free ride into cells. That–theoretically–very much changes the risks of DNA integration.” 

Letter asks for data regarding risks of DNA contaminants

The letter to the FDA asks whether drug manufacturers have evaluated these risks, whether the current standards consider the lipid nanoparticle delivery system, and whether the FDA has evaluated the risks to reproductive cells. The letter requests a response by December 13, but Dr. Ladapo noted in the letter that no response has been received to a previous letter sent by the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) to the FDA and CDC on May 10, 2023.

Dr. Ladapo told Alachua Chronicle that this is primarily an ethical issue because evaluations of these risks are necessary precursors to the use of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. He continued, “The point of what we do is to bring honesty to insanity. There’s a pattern to the things that happened in the pandemic, and it’s crazy stuff that people want to pass off as sane and normal. A great example is this idea that somehow masking two- or three-year-olds does anything other than waste money, waste time, and annoy the kids.”

He said masking toddlers and distributing vaccines with billions of fragments of DNA in each dose are both “crazy.” He emphasized that the research discovering these DNA contaminants has been duplicated by other scientists and acknowledged in communications from the FDA: “It’s truly insane for us to be using [these vaccines] without any sense of what those risks of integration are.”

A column by Maryanne Demasi published in Epoch Times provides this statement sent to Demasi by the FDA in response to her questions about residual DNA issues: “While concerns have been raised previously as theoretical issues, available scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the minute amounts of residual DNA do not cause cancer, or changes to a person’s genetic code.”

What happens next?

Dr. Ladapo said that if the FDA does not respond to his letter, “The appropriate action, because it’s the ethical action, is to advise against [the vaccines’] use in all human beings” until the manufacturers or the FDA provide data about the risks of DNA contaminants in the vaccines. FDOH currently recommends against the COVID-19 booster for individuals under 65 years of age due to the high rate of global immunity and the lack of available data supporting the safety and efficacy of the booster.

Dr. Ladapo said the debate here is different from the debates about rates of myocarditis, strokes, cardiac arrest, or fertility issues after these vaccinations because when it comes to the unknown risks of DNA contaminants, “We’re in an area of pure ethics.”

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